Sunshine Scouts

Oberlin long-form improv group, founded in spring of 1999 by Kevin McShane, Peter O'Leary, Yvonne Piper, and Ariadne Votava. The Sunshine Scouts regularly perform at the Cat in the Cream as well as a number of other locations on campus. The Scouts are known for having a piano player, being taboo, and regularly "packing the Cat."

When founded, the Scouts were a competitive improv troupe based on the Theatersports teachings of Keith Johnstone. The competitive nature of the performances was due in large part to Kevin McShane's fondness for professional wrestling. Staging was high energy and very showy; McShane, who majored in Computer-Related Arts Production (C.R.A.P.), created an intro video set to throbbing music to get the crowd pumped.

Within two years of founding, however, there developed within the group a contingent who felt a desire to move towards a more long-form brand of performance. This contingent included Michael Lebovitz and Duncan Gale, who had recently returned from an intensive summer class at the Improvolympic theater in Chicago. Credit must also be given to Peter O'Leary and Graeme Hinde who were on leave at the time of the "long-form debate" but had been the first members of the group to take the summer class and had urged Lebovitz and Gale to do likewise. While Kevin McShane was director, the Scouts had made a couple of experimental forays into long-form performance, and O'Leary had previously made an abortive attempt to shift the focus of the group entirely to long-form, but it was clear that no such attempt would be successful as long as McShane was in power. McShane even went so far as to expressly forbid the Scouts from becoming a long-form group after he graduated. A kinder, gentler regime ensued the following year with the election of Marissa Leonino as the new director. At a rehearsal in the fall of 2000, Ryan Spangler, who was generally considered to be the mad prophet of the group, took the fateful step of lodging a formal complaint against the current Theatersports regime. His primary objection was that, according to Theatersports rules, during a performance the Scouts were split into two competing factions. This was a practice which he believed undermined the overall morale and creative integrity of the group. This objection, along with the growing belief in the superior artistic potential of long-form both by those who had studied it in Chicago and by those who were simply ready for a change from the current practices, led to an extended debate which, while growing somewhat heated at times, ended amicably. What was arguably the most important decision in the history of the Sunshine Scouts had been made: to perform long-form improv exclusively.

This ushered in what is widely considered to be the Golden Age of the Sunshine Scouts. No longer were the Scouts simply a flashy light-show/wrestling match with little in the way of solid scenework. With the move to long-form the actual craft of improv moved to center stage, along with a growing experimentation in the improvisational forms available to give some structure to the shows.

Membership between the two improv groups has fluctuated from time to time with people getting into one group and then deciding they preferred the other form of improv more.

[edit] Roster

The current roster of the Scouts includes:

[edit] Subforms

Favorite sub-forms of the Sunshine Scouts include:

The Harold
The Freeform
The "Dream-form"
The Bat
The Drunk-form (a.k.a. "Now You See Us... Now We're Drunk!!")
The Maude
The Paper Tiger (a.k.a. "Duncan Gale's ill-conceived, gratuitously complex cluster-fuck)